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Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology's regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories-the narrative of capital's emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture-works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story-one in which people who presumably manifest the dysfunctions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery-a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way that complicates and illuminates Ellison's project.

Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson's work introduces a new mode of discourse-which Ferguson calls queer of color analysis-that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology.

Roderick A. Ferguson is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.

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Toward a Queer of Color Critique

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In this brilliant book, Rod Ferguson interrogates canonical sociologys' regulation of sexual difference as part of its pathologization of African American culture. Sophisticated in its critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic,and epistemological formations, this book breaks new ground in sociology, American studies, queer theory, and women of color feminism. Great for graduate and undergraduate courses on the problematic history of the discipline of sociology as well as courses on sexuality and queer theory.